The Darkest of Days: An Oral History
by BlindAcquiescence
Summary: An Oral History of the Liberation of Humanity. Taken from the personal accounts of survivors of the greatest struggle in human history.
1. Introduction

**A/N: Yes I realize it's been forever since I updated Shephard's Epic, don't fret, though, its still alive and kicking! But every once in a blue moon, I need a side project to bring new life into my masterpiece so that it doesn't become dry and repetitive! This work was born out of my reading "World War Z" By Max Brooks, as well as the marketing program "Believe, the John 117 Monument" for Halo 3. I believe Bungie did an amazing job with the marketing for Halo 3, and I personally believe it is the only thing that Halo has on Half-life.**

**Anyways, enjoy!**

_The Darkest of Days_

_An Oral History of the Liberation_

Mitchell Dickinson

Foreword 

It is my distinct pleasure to be given the honor of writing a foreword for the tenth anniversary of my work _The Darkest Days_. At the time I set out with pad, pencil, and recorder, I knew this book would be unlike any penned to date. I did not take on this challenge lightly; I suffered through many nights of soul searching, unsure of how the final product would leave the reader. Like so many of my contemporaries, I was born out of the jubilation of those First Days, when our parents were freed from the repressive restraints that had been imposed on them since almost before _their _parents generation. As one of the _Rebel Born_ generation, I was fortunately denied the chance to live under the oppressive Combine regime, but this lack of experience also kept me from truly understanding the sacrifice and utter determination the previous generation endured during their fight to, as the father of the Resistance once said, "take back our world."

This is why I began my pilgrimage across the globe, tracking down those with truly unique points of view, or looking even within my own community to find those who saw the war with their own eyes. Because it is this generation who took up arms and, in the tradition of the human spirit, brought their enemies to their knees. These were the men and women who fought for a way of life not all of them even remembered. Even now, ten years since my work was first published, we are still finding evidence that makes the odds constantly fall in the Universal Union's favor, yet at the same time are able only to find victory for our own species.

This is the spirit of the Rebellion, how in the darkest of days, it was the drive to make a better world that inspired an entire generation, an entire race, to risk its collective neck.

**Philadelphia, Pennsylvania**

**[The VA Hospital is sparkling white, absolutely sterile. Outside the windows, the snow falls wildly, temperatures have begun to return to normal, but the winters are still much too long. Across from me sits Corporal Bernard Winters, retired of course. He sucks on a hand-rolled cigarette; the earthy fumes betray the fact that it is most likely not tobacco. He sits hunched over in his hoverchair, his eyes following the snowflakes, refusing to make contact with my own.**

I first saw action in City 12, I think they're calling it Brussels now. I'd hitched a ride from the coast after the Resistance had taken control of a few of the overland rail-systems. I was a boot, fresh outta training in City 28, where I'd lived most of my life. The Resistance had been recruiting people since before Nova, and we were in the middle of infantry training when the rebellion happened.

1 City 12 has since been renamed Nova Antigone, in the area formerly belonging to Belarus

2 City 28, known today, as well as before the occupation, as Cairo

3 Nova: Nova Prospekt, the destruction of which is seen as the catalyst for the Uprising

_**So you were a private then? **_

**[Winters taps the joint in an ashtray and smiles wryly.**

Son, we didn't have rank back then, not in the beginning. Not until we were folded into the rest of the AHR did we start using rank.

_**You mean the "Allied Human Resistance"?**_

Yup, well we had squad leaders and strategic coordinators who ran the show, handed out orders, but for the most part we were a volunteer unit. Volunteer world savers. When the Lambda resistance and the remnants of the US military and UK-French-Russian Composite finally hooked up, we had to change our whole regiment.

**[Winters begins coughing raggedly, a nurse nearby rushes to his side, a vial of green liquid in her hand. Injecting it into his arm, he slowly recovers, though his demeanor is much more relaxed.**

Sorry…Too much exposure to plasma coil injectors, the doctors say. Supposed to be a one-in-four-million chance you're susceptible to it.

_**You mean the ammunition for the old Overwatch Standard Issue Pulse Rifles?**_

**[Winters sucks at his joint.**

Help save the world, and life rewards me with an eviction notice, don't think I've missed the irony. But really, we salvaged what we could from Overwatch corpses, and AR2's were the crème of the crop. Those babies would cut through a metrocop or a bullsquid like a hot knife through butter. I don't know a guy in my squad who wouldn't grab one, first chance he got.

_**Were most of the men in your squad as inexperienced as you were, when you first saw action?**_

Hell, most of us had barely held a gun before they threw us on that goddamn boat. They did it in the dead of night too, our city was on high alert, any and all civil unrest was dealt with harshly. One of our boys, a mousy guy by the name of Radcliff, didn't know how to swim, I mean, in those days, when were you gonna have a chance to learn? Most of the open water was infested with leaches, and the rivers and canals were full of that toxic shit. Kid slipped on a gangway, fell in the water and drowned. Guess you could call him the first casualty we had. That's how green we were.

**[Winters sets the dead joint in the ashtray and pulls the oxygen mask over his face, taking several deep breaths.**

Our first engagement was in an old school yard just on the outskirts of City 12. We followed our squad leader, Danielle Filkins, in a perimeter check. We could hear the fighting in the city, the explosions felt like their were less than a click away, when it was more like ten. That's when Overwatch hit us. They came fast, too fast for anything human. We were pinned down before we knew it, I remember taking cover in an old dugout. We took four casualties before we finally got the bastards. I remember looking into the glowing blue eyes on those masks.

**[Corporal Winters becomes visibly shaken**

That's when us boots finally realized, these fuckers meant _business_.

_**How did your squad, and the rest of the Lambda Resistance, react when military advisers from General Destovaya's outfit arrived to marshal your induction into the rest of the armed resistance movement?**_

**[Winters shrugs **

Didn't think much of it at first. No, no I take that back. I was ecstatic, I mean, these guys knew their stuff, they had the hardware, the ordinance, the technology to deal the real blow we'd be trying to land on the Combine for all those months. We'd been holding Cities, pushing the Combine back to the brink after they first lost contact with the Farside, but we couldn't take them down like those Marines could.

I think, for the most part, that was the sentiment. But a lot of people, some of my squad included, felt different. They thought remnants of the United States government coming in and taking control was like the days before the Occupation, and having the armed resistance being controlled by the military remnant of an old super power was asking for trouble. A lot of the soldiers looked down on us, thought we were yokels, yahoos who didn't know the barrel of the gun from its butt. There were a lot of misunderstandings, I think, in the beginning. It didn't help when they began instituting old vestiges of the Military machine, either.

_**You mean the court-marshals…**_

And the corporal punishments, and the firing squads.

**[Winters spits in the ashtray disgustedly**

Like I said before, we were a volunteer unit. Any man who didn't want to follow orders could leave. But these soldiers… they were used to a different kind of discipline. We all had the same fighting spirit, but these men knew that if they didn't keep their cool, stand their ground, there would be hell to pay. I heard about LaR troopers who disobeyed orders, being shot by their military CO's. Now I understand, those were tough times, crazy times, but I still don't know how I feel about some of the things that went on. We were all in it together, the LaR troops, the Marines, the Composites. But the thought of shooting a soldier for disobeying orders, when there weren't many of us left _period_ stinks of poor judgment to me.

4 LaR: _Lambda Resistance_

**[It was at this point that Corporal Winter refused to elaborate more on his experiences**


	2. The Real Heroes

**Dublin, Ireland**

**[Alan Weissman was a medic in one of the many, unfortunately nameless Lambda Resistance squads that had been the first fighters on the scene in the infamous City 17. Since they initially did not abide by military code, none of the squad members have any way of reconnecting with one another, which also makes battlefield statistics in that first great battle useless. Sitting in the living room on his home in Dublin, the former LaR trooper sips at his tea.**

I don't care what you say, Freeman wasn't the real hero. Neither was that Shephard guy. I know they got that statue of those two in that museum they're building…

**_The Victory Monument in the Hall of the World Senate._**

Yeah, that. I know they got an entire wing dedicated to those two. But if you ask me, it was Barney who was the real patron saint of the Resistance.

**_Barney Calhoun, you mean the former Black Mesa Security Guard-turned double agent inside Civil Protection?_**

**[Weissman nods emphatically and pours himself another cup of tea**

That guy risked his goddamn neck by spying on Civil Protection from the inside! The man never got his dues, though. He was first on the scene, as soon as Freeman had turned Nova Prospekt into a pile of rubble and Antlion entrails, giving orders and coordinating with the scientists on how to take the city. Damn, if it weren't for him, Freeman would have never made it to the Citadel in the first place!

The first day of fighting my squad was holed up in an old department store, waiting for the word to storm the apartment block next to us. It was being used as a staging ground for what was left of the metropolice. Right as we got the call, we got hit with heavy fire from their suppression device. Tore the building to pieces. Me and another guy were the only ones who didn't get caught in the rubble. Within minutes Barney and his team were there, mopping up the Combine. When the area was clear they set to work helping us dig the rest of our squad out of the rubble. Barney was there, all night long, helping us dig. I still think that man had his own fabled H.E.V. suit, the way he pulled our men out of there.

I hooked up with his squad after that. In that first week alone, Barney single handedly marshaled the entire resistance against the Combine, pushing them back to the walls of their precious Citadel. I even remember his last words to Freeman before he stormed that monstrosity.

**_That's common knowledge by now._**

**[Weissman smiles and chuckles**

Well, to those of us that knew Calhoun, it was pretty uncommon to hear him curse like that.

**_After that first week, between the fall of the citadel and the battle at White Forest his whereabouts are still unaccounted for._**

I was on that last train out of City 17 with him and the civvies. The only people left behind us were Freeman and Eli's daughter. We followed the tracks out past the forest, to one of the 'fugee camps. We regrouped there and rearmed. In the chaos I lost Calhoun. I wouldn't see him until the victory march into London. He looked older then, his hair had almost grayed completely. But then again, if you took as many risks as Barney did, you'd be gray at the ripe old age of 40 as well.

1 The refugee camps set up outside the theoretical blast radius of the citadel's dark energy reactor meltdown. There are many reports of these hastily set up stations falling prey to the creatures that still inhabited the wastelands at that time. There is even one account of a creature classified as a "Bohemoth" destroying an entire village-camp, with a reported death-toll of 740 City 17 survivors.

**_You believe that Barney Calhoun should receive his own monument?_**

No… He wouldn't have wanted that. He wasn't the type of man to want a statue made of 'im. Though from what I hear, Freeman and Shephard don't want their images cast in stone either. **[Sighs** But I guess people need those things, need to remember what was at stake, and who pulled us back, away from the brink.** [Weissman leans forward, speaking softly, almost secretively** I'll tell you what, though. The type of monument Barney got isn't the type that'll be photographed by tourists, or visited by school children fifty years hence. It's out there, in the ruins of half the cities in Eastern Europe. It's the plasma holes in the concrete, or the fallen walls of a dozen Citadels. He was the one who made us fight, made us _believe_ we had a chance. And if I ever see him again, I'm gonna make sure he knows, that all this was thanks to him.


	3. Strangelove Complex?

Darwin, Australia

**[Darwin, originally a bustling coastal city on the Timor Sea, is now a main industrial center for the Australian territories vast Uranium mining. With water levels still lower than pre-Occupation records, and the harbor rusted and corroded after more than a decade of disuse, the city has lost its naval niche, and adopted the warehouse and mining pick as its city's seal. Lieutenant Robert Neeway sits in an office overlooking the main production facility. His title as overseer has him constantly looking over quality reports, and inspecting the processed uranium for transport to government and fusion reactor facilities. His position during the war as Special Weapons advisor to General Destovaya has been seen as a linchpin for many of the military's victories.**

**_Aside from those still classified by the World Senate Judiciary Committee, what can you tell us about the "Secret Weapons" the military had at it's disposal?_**

Everyone thought when we came charging in on our white horse that we had all the answers, that we had lasers or death rays, or a giant fucking can of Raid. But the fact was that all we had were what people saw. If you've been brought up on stories of armies with giant tanks and huge guns, and you're part of a resistance with maybe… a few scattered submachine guns all scavenged from a metrocop barricade, you're gonna think one of the old Abram's is one hell of a weapon. Hell, I remember escorting a payload of a couple of 50 cals to one of the LaR bases, and the look on those redneck's faces was priceless. Sure an AR could fire plasma. But nothing gives you the satisfaction of pulling the trigger of _Ma Deuce_ and shelling out hot lead at over five hundred rounds per minute.

1 The M1 Abrams, a pre-Occupation tank used by the US military and later by the surviving remnants

_**So there wasn't really any "Secret Weapon", was there? All smoke and mirrors to increase morale?**_

**[Neeway brushes a weathered hand through his white hair, his face, wrinkled with age, smiles apologetically.**

No, that's not exactly what I meant to convey. What I was trying to say was that in the interim years, people had been so hard pressed for the right hardware, that when they finally were able to receive some, they thought it was just what they needed. We had a few trump cards, sure, but for the most part, what people needed was _hope_, and those little remnants of another day, a stronger day, were sometimes all that was needed.

**And these trump cards you mentioned, they were…**

**[Neeway furrows his brow**

You know I'm not at liberty to speak about that. The only one that has been declassified were the B61 tactical nukes. They were the only ones used by the military during the Eastern Campaigns in the states, and those final engagements in northern Russia.

_**The low yield nuclear weapons weren't the only ones used. There were the two three-megaton detonations recorded in the former Peoples Republic of China. What were your thoughts on the remnants of the Chinese military deciding to use their remaining DF-4 thermonuclear weapons?**_

Chinese_military?_ Those sorry excuses for soldiers give lunatics a bad name. They were a rogue faction, incapable of making decisions of that importance; they merely had the luxury of being in possession of several _outdated_ missile delivery systems at the time of the Uprising. They turned an entire portion of their own country into a radiation zone that the NRC says wont be habitable for at least another century!

**[Neeway takes several deep breaths and smiles**

I'm sorry, I don't mean to sound so angry.

_**You said that the "rogue factions" had the fortune of being in possession of weapons of mass destruction. Couldn't the same be said of your situation, Lieutenant Neeway? Your group of soldiers had access to the same, even more powerful, types of weapons, and wielded them without restraint?**_

**[Neeway snorts disgustedly**

What we did wasn't half as bad as those squinty-eyed bastards. Our nukes were sub-kiloton yield, enough to take out a square mile or two. We used them more for the EMP! The damn pulse scrambled the wiring on most of the Combine's unshielded synth soldiers. What we did in Chicago and Atlanta and New York got us back our country with minimal fall out. Now China is a ghost town, bad as Chernobyl was before the occupation, but on a scale the eggheads only dreamed out in their worst nightmares! No, I stood by my decision to use our nuclear arsenal, and I stand by it today. Every city we nuked now has people living in it, 100 radiation free. Tell that to the Chinese.

2 EMP: Electromagnetic Pulse generated by the detonation of Thermonuclear weapons

_**What were General Destovaya's thoughts?**_

The General never cared for our nuclear arsenal, said we'd destroy the planet before we destroyed the Combine. But after the Borealis… everything changed.

_**You mean the Dark Matter weapons?**_

**[Neeway nods solemnly as he takes a seat at his desk, pulling open a drawer, and retrieving a picture. Sliding it across the table, the photo shows a complete wasteland. In the distance one can make out the silhouette of a destroyed cityscape, ragged rebar spouting from half-ruined buildings as they lean against one another. The after shot of a Dark Matter detonation.**

When the Combine knew they'd been beat, knew the end was drawing nigh, they detonated the Dark Matter Fusion reactors in cities that were under attack, and not likely to survive. Seventeen was an accident, the catalyst to what would follow. This one **[gesturing to the photo**, was Sao Paolo, one of the first. After that, Destovaya gave me full authority to authorize the usage of our remaining tactical nukes.

**[Neeway takes the photo back, slipping it back into the drawer**

_**To be used as weapons of last resort?**_

To be used offensively, actually. The Combine may have been trans-dimensional overlords, but they still relied on _some_ kind of circuitry.

_**I don't follow…**_

The majority of the Combine's truly offensive forces, for example the striders, the gunships, the synthcrabs, were all biomech's. Organic matter encasing and coexisting with electronic circuitry. The majority of brain matter housed a lot of circuitry that wouldn't look much different from what turn of the century desktop computers used. The electromagnetic pulse would fry those logic circuits, making them unusable, or atleast malfunctioning. The advantage that this afforded us in battle, along with the destructive power of the device itself, was key on several occasions.

_**But current research suggests that there were more civilian casualties, people who were not warned of the impending detonations, that might have been recorded had the weapons not been used. **_

**[Lieutenant Neeway sits quietly for a moment, eyes fixated on the faux-Oakwood desk. When he finally responds, it is no louder than a whisper.**

Civilians? I was unaware there were such a thing during the war. Everyone was a soldier, Mr. Dickinson, everyone fought, and most of them _died_.

**[Neeway stands from his desk, gesturing to the bustling industrial center below.**

They died so that we could have our planet back. You and your generation don't realize what was at stake. We were a people who had endured more than twenty years of an occupation, slavery, and humiliation that stripped us of our dignity! People of your parents' generation fought and died, **[His tone becomes erratically sarcastic.** not to save the world from fascism or for the right to taxation with representation! **[His voice becomes louder, angry** We fought to survive one more day; we fought on the brink for months, desperately trying to drive back that cold dark night that was our looming extinction.

**[Taking several deep breaths, Neeway continues, albeit calmer**

At the end of the war, the human population was 1.4 Billion. Our numbers haven't grown more than several million since then, but at least we still _exist_. Had we not used those weapons, and _yes_, had some of those people been given more warning, you and I wouldn't be having this conversation! We did the job with man-made weapons. We stood up to a galaxy spanning empire and gave it the finger, so if you're asking me if I believe we operated outside our authority then you are simply _mistaken_.

**[At this point, Lieutenant Neeway called an end to our interview.**


	4. Memorial to Defeat

**Site of the Former San Quentin State Prison**

**[The shattered walls and ruined halls speak of the intense fighting that raged here in the last days of the Uprising. This, like so many other former buildings belonging to the penitentiary institutions of Man, was perverted and changed to fit the Combine's own sick agenda. Similar in purpose to the famed Nova Prospekt, San Quentin was used to house the political prisoners of the occupation; innocent men and women who were subjected to horrible 'reeducation' and 'reintegration' tactics. As was later confirmed, these prisons were some of the manufacturing plants for the dreaded Stalkers and Immolators. Edith Garrison walks the silent halls of this memorial; garbed in the uniform she wore all those years ago, when her unit liberated this facility.**

We'd heard about these places before. Stories of places they'd take whole train cars of people, which would always come back empty. 'Someone's always getting on, but no one ever gets off', they'd say. I remember even hearing they'd gotten intel from some of the Vort's who'd been captured. One of my buddies was in Intel, said what their Vortigaunt described chills him to this day.

**[Edith's eyes study a set of tightly packed bullet holes in the crumbling tile walls.**

I didn't believe him, not till we were on the warpath, liberating this settlement, laying siege to that city. Once the Oregon Reclamation Campaign was over, and we had taken out charlie's chief production center on the west coast, did we have the resources to move south, through California and down to Baja. Division had us marching through Point Quentin when orders came through to attack the Combine facility to the east. I remember my squad was moving up, behind the Abram's for cover, we could hear the sirens, saw those dirty Metrocops manning the watch towers. We blasted our way through the north wall, and into the yard. We fanned out, but the first two squads had already taken out any resistance in the yard. Alpha squad prepped the door with a charge, and we were in business.

_**But you didn't know what you'd find inside?**_

Hell no. Shit I thought it was gonna be another goddamn munitions depot. I was actually excited; I was hoping to get my hands on an AR2. I'd heard stories, but when I finally was able to grab one, I never put it down! But anyways, no, I had no clue what we'd find. But Jesus was I ever surprised, we were all surprised! I remember we must have blown our way into the minimum security wing; the first tier of cells were packed with starving and diseased prisoners, people who hadn't seen a good meal or a hot shower for months.

_**So you were able to help them?**_

**[We both walk into a long hallway resembling what Edith was describing; long rows of dirty cells line the walls three stories high. The evidence of the carnage is everywhere; cell doors bent from explosions, pieces of the catwalks above that have fallen to the floor below.**

That's the thing, we couldn't help them right away. We were still ass deep in Charlie. We fought them literally wing-by-wing. And not just Metrocops, but Overwatch's special prison security details as well. We lost nearly a quarter of our platoon clearing out that goddamn hellhole. I remember taking cover near one of the occupied cells. Before long I felt fingers gripping at my fatigues through the cell bars. I turned instinctively and nearly blew the head off an old man as he lay dying of thirst in his cell.

**[She bows her head as a hand grips one of the rusty cell doors.**

I wish I could give you a happy ending. Like I threw him my canteen and I saw him in a field hospital afterwards. **[She sighs** But I didn't. I was too busy dodging pulse fire to do anything but keep myself from shooting him. Though that might have been a blessing, given his condition.

_**But you **_**were **_**able to save a great many more from what had been going on?**_

Yeah… most of them weren't much better than that old man. And some of them…

_**The Stalkers?**_

Yeah, the Stalkers. And the Immolators as well, no one seems to remember that those freaks were once human as well. **[She spits in disgust**. Those bastards took honest people and changed into their garbage men… We had cleared out most of the resistance when we started sending teams into the sub-basement sections of the prison. Down there we saw… terrible things.

_**I was told that section of the prison, the medical and experimentation wings, were off limits to visitors, too much debris.** _

**[The former Marine shakes her head.**

I found entire torsos of human beings, kept alive down there. Shriveled up pieces of flesh, kept in specimen containers for future analysis. I even remember seeing severed human limbs, thin and leathery with decay, connected by electrodes and wires, to computer screens, trying to give life and movement to the dead appendages. There isn't a single shred of debris down there, because we torched the entire wing. Our division commander said he'd be damned if we'd let your generation see what had been done to us.

We had looked into the mouth of hell that day, and not a single one of us walked away from it the same person we had been before. A few of the squad eventually greased themselves; a consequence of the lack of shrinks in the AHR.

_**Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, they couldn't handle the horror of what they saw.**_

Look I don't know what Nova Prospekt was like, or the Chicago prison camps, or the gulags in Russia, but if it was _anything_ like what I saw, then anyone who lived through that would be lucky to get away with their sanity intact.

**[Edith bends down and scoops up several rusted shell casings.**

Nine millimeter… must have been an MP7. **[She holds one of the casings up close**. Plenty of people I saw locked in these cages begged us to put them out of their misery. Division wanted them treated by the field medics and set up in temporary housing while they waited for transport to the refugee camps. But some of these people had lost that light in their eyes. The light that keeps us alive, keeps us fighting. They were beaten, pure and simple, and there was nothing we could do besides slap a few bandages on them, wash 'em up, and stick them in a hospital bed. The moans… When things had calmed down, and the facility was more or less under our control, I was walking with the rest of my squad to meet up with the CO in the prison yard. We past the med tents, you know, those hastily stitched together bed sheets you still see the rural folk hoarding for warmth these days, and the sounds coming out of it were almost as bad as what we had seen inside.

**[A group of tourists can be heard being lead down a nearby hall by one of the memorial's curators. Edith pockets a couple of the rusted shells, offering me an apologetic smile. **

Before we passed that tent, the men were in a relatively good mood. We'd just liberated another town. But the sounds that came out of that tent silenced them. No one said a single word till we were back on the march… I guess in retrospect one could say that even though by Division's standards we'd won the day, driven back the boogiemen, but for the soldier's on the ground, the people who did the fighting, it was a total defeat.


	5. Sins of Our Fathers

**Vancouver, People's Republic of Cascadia**

**Vancouver, once one of the largest cities within the old Canadian provinces, still bustles with the murmuring and lolling of pedestrians and electric streetcars. I sit across from Nicolai Byelyakova, who is sipping his tea. We've only just met at the register. He had seen my face on the news, and asked if I would listen to his story. He presents me with credentials indicating that he's the proprietor of an organic plastics manufacturer based out of Redding, California.**

My family moved to the United States from Siberia in 1990, just after the Iron Curtain had finally fallen. They looked forward to the prospect of escaping the totalitarian regime, which had governed every aspect of their lives since birth. We settled in the small, predominantly Russian community of Woodburn, just north the Oregon-Washington border. My father was an electrician before he left the USSR, and found a job working for a telecommunications company based out of Portland. I was eighteen when we first heard the reports on the television of the nuclear disaster at Black Mesa.

**_How did your family react?_**

**Nicolai shrugs.** My mother was Old Russian, she didn't seem to have an opinion on anything. My father, he simply shook his head and mumbled Nicolai utters something incomprehensible in Russian. To the effect of, "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds". Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of your first nuclear fission weapons, he quoted that phrase from the Bhagavad Gita, the old Hindu scripture, did he not? Nicolai waves a dismissive hand. Anyways, he was very quite from then on. I considered my father a learned man, with an opinion on everything. But after that original incident, he kept to himself mostly. I remember lying awake at night, listening to them murmuring in their room across the hall of our small house. They talked in hushed tones about what should happen if that event were to escalate their newfound homeland into a full-on nuclear war.

**_But that didn't happen, the Portal storms followed soon after didn't they?_**

**Nicolai nods, setting the empty teacup down.**

No one could have predicted it. Sure we saw the telecasts. Those who supposedly survived the blast who came out decrying the government about their "silencings". My parents were used to the idea of the government using it's own military to keep incriminating incidents under wraps. But when those first storms erupted, they began to take it seriously. I remember when the first one hit PDX, the airport just outside of Portland. The news headlines claimed that twelve planes and almost four hundred people died.

1 Unfortunately all records taken by the FAA were destroyed when the Combine burned D.C. to the ground, so the actual number of dead to this day remains uncertain.

But, yes, you're right, before the war could escalate; the Portal Storms began tearing the region apart. We were lucky, though; the Pacific Northwest was the least damaged area of the continental United States. Researchers to this day still debate the reason why there seemed to be a black out area over most of the region, something about the amount of iron ore deposits and their distribution. When the first storm struck Vancouver, I woke the next morning to an empty house. My parents had packed the family sedan down with supplies. Camping gear, canned goods, and even a hunting rifle, all tied down on the roof of a Honda civic! It was almost laughable. I remember yelling at my father, screaming at him in the middle of the yard, telling him he was crazy, that he was going to go hide in the wilderness like all the crazies in the Siberian tundra.

**_How did he react?_**

He told me that if I didn't get in the car they would leave me. I scoffed at him, abandon his own son? I remember him screaming at me about family and honoring my father and mother. I told him I could never follow a lunatic. I wasn't thinking narrow-mindedly, I kept telling myself; I was assessing the situation like a rational person, not blindly following authority like my parents had all their lives. I told him he could rot out there in the woods for all I cared; I was going to stay and help.

**_And did you?_**

**Nicholai's smile disappears.**

I remember I had packed a backpack full of clothing and bottled water, and set off down the highway, looking for the nearest Red Cross tent, to lend my meager aid. I walked for two days before I heard the _thwump thwump_ of the artillery. I didn't realize it at the time, but the smoke coming off of Vancouver was from the fighting, not the damage done by the storms.

**His tone becomes lower, sorrowful.**

I saw things… a strider crossed the highway as I hid under an overpass, soldiers skewered on its needle-like legs. I saw a truck filled with National Guard soldiers ripped apart by hunters. I was lying in a ditch, covering myself with mud, praying to God over the screams of those men that I wouldn't be next. The entire time I could think of nothing but how my father had been right, how staying was useless. I wept like a child, wishing with all my might that they were spared the terrible things I saw. And even after the cities had been taken… Nicholai scoffs… seven hours later, though it felt like seven days, there were still the creatures to deal with. The eco-system now had new tenants, and they were a rowdy lot.

**_The Xen wildlife brought through by the storms?_**

Completely new species, nothing the Earth had ever seen before, and nothing it was prepared to accept or accommodate. These creatures ripped apart what the planet had taken millennia to carefully balance. I tried hunting, only to find that bullsquids and houndeyes had devoured most of the land game. In an act of despair, I even tried the delicacy our Vortigaunt allies seem to enjoy to heartily…

**_You don't mean…_**

**Nicolai nods slowly.**

They sure don't taste like crab, that's all I'll say on _that_ particular subject. Eventually I was forced to surrender to the nearest checkpoint… After so many days in the bush, I looked like one of the survivors of the old gulags my parents had told me about in hushed tones. I remember civil protection, who in those days were slightly friendlier than their later counterparts, took me in and fed me, until I was strong enough to be transported to a relocation camp. After that… well I'm sure my story isn't much different from those you'll hear from a majority of people. I was shipped between cities until I wasn't sure _what_ continent I was on, until the war broke out.

**_Did you ever find out what happened to your parents?_**

After the relative end of hostilities, after I'd started my company, thanks to the technological help of our "benefactors" **(Nicolai chuckles)** I took time off to search the forests near Vancouver for any trace of what might have happened. With the renewal of the Freedom of Information Act, I was able to look through the old Combine databases, but didn't find my parents' names on any personnel files. I followed a detachment of troops charged with clearing the forests surrounding the city of any "non-native organic life". We found arrangements ranging in size from single-family camps to small cities of tents. I searched each one, looking for anything that might lead me to believe my family had been among them.

**_And did you?_**

We had been hiking for almost a week when we came upon it… a small campsite, only one tent, next to the river. It was a lonely spot; we hadn't seen any other traces of human life for nearly twenty klicks. I can't remember the tent my father had packed, but this seemed like one he would have chosen, small, discrete, forest green to blend in with the environment. We checked inside, only to find two skeletons, hands clasped together in a death grip, their heads tilted towards one another. I don't know if it was them… but I like to think it was.


	6. A Beautiful Mind

**Pretoria, South Africa**

**The loft apartment is larger than those you'd find in many American cities, a product of the early Twentieth century regentrification efforts put forward by Pretoria's municipal department, right before the occupation. The walls are covered in works of art that would send shivers up the spines of many survivors of the post-Seven Hour War generation. Combine propaganda posters, the kind that adorn several of the halls of the Victory Monument's museum wing, are plastered upon the brick walls. The Universal Union's insignia, that vice squeezing the life out of a small circle that could represent any number of enslaved planets, is on just about every one of them. In the background a soft, slightly sorrowful melody plays. The apartment in which I find myself belongs to Regina Toutualla, a sixty year-old survivor of the holocaust. Regina, though, cannot be interviewed, because she no longer possesses the faculties that allow us to the same. I am accompanied by her caretaker, Lydia.**

I've known Regina since we roomed together in City 09. She was new to the system, hadn't been tagged, which was surprising, considering the war had ended almost fifteen years prior to our meeting. She didn't talk much, mostly kept to herself. One night, while she was downstairs picking up her ration for the next day, I took a chance and stole her iDent card, found out she was a low-level tech at the nearby munitions depot. She opened up to me one night, and told me about how her family had been rounded up early on in the occupation, and how her parents had been executed on her front lawn. The poor girl, only about ten at the time, took off for the woods, and called it home for the next dozen years.

1. City 09, the Combine designation for what remained of Buenos Aires.

**Lydia shakes her head as she watches Regina run from canvas to canvas, painting and repainting the same posters hung up on the wall of her apartment. It's an eerie sight, how this woman, whose mental faculties have long since left her, can paint such stunning recreations of art that were once used to carouse and demoralize an entire species.**

I just don't know how that child survived in the wilderness all those years. Anyways, civil protection must have eventually found her. From the day she moved in, she seemed rebellious. She got ahold of spray paint cans, spray paint cans for godsake! She used them to graffiti all kinds of surfaces. Her grammar left something to be desired, but for someone with a third grade education, she made do. Mostly she drew symbols. First it was the outline of a metrocop's helmet inside a circle with a cross on it, she eventually moved on, profiles of soldiers that border on pure art. It wasn't until I saw that ubiquitous lambda symbol sprayed over our door did I finally saw something.

**_You were against her actions, which were forbidden by the Combine?_**

**Lydia grimaces.**

It's not so much that I was _against_ it; so much as I was against being dragged out of my bed by civil protection in the wee hours of morning, and never being seen again. What she was doing was downright dangerous, but she didn't know. She had seen her parents murdered infront of her own eyes, and had lived for god knows how long in the wastes by herself. **(Lydia stares quietly at Regina she picks up a pale of white paint and stares at the massive collage)** It's no wonder she was emotional and mentally stunted.

**_So you spoke with her about her subversive actions?_**

I told her I wouldn't be a party to it. She could throw her life away if she wanted, but she wasn't going to drag me down with her. I requested a tenent-transfer the next day.

**_Do you know what happened to her after you moved out?_**

I was walking back to my dormitory one evening, when several metrocops ran past me, squawking incoherently. I turned around and saw them pull their stun-sticks out. Someone ran out of the alley nearby and the CPs raised their batons, and ordered them to stop. I saw her turn around to face them, and that's when I recognized her.

**_Regina?_**

**Lydia nods as we both watch Regina slick the white pain out over the collage she painted only recently. Her fevered movements suggest an underlying compulsion to wipe the slate clean, which would be poetic, if she could actually understand it.**

She didn't go down without a fight, I saw her kick one of those metrocops square in the goodies. **Lydia smiles.** I can still hear his pathetic wheezing through that goddamn mask. They eventually beat her unconscious though, and dragged her away, into a nearby APC. That's the last I saw of her. I know I should have felt guilty, felt ashamed that I stood by and watched them drag her off to god-knows where to have god-knows what done to her. But you know what? I didn't. I'm not ashamed to say it now. At the time, I was just glad it wasn't me under those swinging stun-sticks, I was _glad_ it wasn't me who was going to be hauled off to the nearest reeducation camp, or turned into a stalker. I was angry at her, angry at her foolishness.

**Lydia frowns, not willing to meet me in the eye.**

But now that I look back on it, I think I was, deep down, jealous. Jealous of her courage, and her will to fight on in the only way she knew how. I carried that burden throughout all those years, into the Rebellion, and I still carry it today. I eventually found her, I had made a little mission of mine, a penance, if you will, to find out what happened to her. I found her in a hospital tent outside of Jakarta, almost totally comatose. She had been off the grid since she was deported, because I couldn't find any of her ident logs in the old Combine database after the war. But as luck would have it, her thumb must have been scanned by the medic when he was making his rounds, because it finally showed up on the net. When we met, she was a vegetable. The doctor said she'd been tortured beyond an inch of her life, and the Combine might as well have done her a favor and killed her outright.

**_So what did you do?_**

The only thing I could. I applied for an apartment in my hometown, as well as Regina's- ironic isn't it?- and took care of her. I fed her, clothed her, made sure she didn't drown in her baths. Then one day, as I was coming back from the market, I found her drawing on the walls. At first I was angry, I was furious that she would draw such things. She motions to the propaganda. She couldn't understand me, she still doesn't, but I resigned myself to the what she was doing, and even bought her paint.

**_You don't find it uncomfortable living around art that the Combine used to entrench their dominion over Earth?_**

**Lydia smiles and gestures for me to follow her into another room. She slowly opens the door.**

I don't spend much time watching her paint _that_ crap. I like to spend my days in here, surrounded by this…

**The room, from floor to ceiling, is covered in graffiti. Lambda symbols and crude portraits of Chancellor Breen with the caption RESIST written below adorn the wall**, **among other symbols of the Resistance.**

Surrounded by the memories of the good people we were too scared to protect.


End file.
